Laboratory and Home Science Resources

Microscopes are excellent tools for revealing the great details of tiny things but the pictures taken from the microscope are limited to the size of the field of view and furthermore limited by the size of your camera sensor.  If you want to take picture of a subject larger than the field of view, you would need to take series of photos containing part of the subject then stitch them together.  It's further complicated by the dept of focus.  You would need to stack series of photos focusing on different focal plane.  Here, I am demonstrated the use of freely available so

Screen box is an important tool for rock hounds to separate rocks from small particles, such as sand or mud.  During screening, the small particles fall through the screen while the larger particles stayed in the box. When collecting rocks from creeks (creeking), you can use dig up sediments and place it in the screenbox and allow the stream to flush away the dirt.  The rocks that are larger than the size of the mesh will retain in the box.  You can also use it during digging.

After years of numerous field trips, you might have accumulated thousands of specimens collected from all over the world.  Now, your fellow rock hounds want to see what can be collected from a site that you visits years ago or wanted to exchange some specimens with you.  You vaguely remember that you have the specimens but you don't remember where you put them.  Back to the old days, we wrote our collection on notebooks but it still takes a long time to flip through the pages.

The microscope image aquisition and measurment software give you the convenience of taking the measurement and annotation of the distance easily.  While you draw a line across an object on the digital image, the length of the line just automatically showed up on the screen.  How does it work?  Today, our microscope cameras take digital images which consist of pixels.  Each pixel can be located by its coordinates.  The distances between two points on the image can be calculated by their coordinates.

The quality of the images captured by the microscope camera is greatly affected by the image aquisition software.  We have used Tucsen camera to take photos for various subjects under microscopes.  The quality of the images taken by Tucsen microscope camera was affected by the bundled TSView software.  We previously have found the difficulty of using Tucsen's camera for taking photos of summerville lace agate (contains mainly quartz) under polarized light.  In the previous release, TSView only provides the option of white balance.

Microscope camera borrow much of the technology from consumer camera and videocam.  The resolution of today's microscope camera is much higher than a few years ago.  Much of these were due to the advances in the camera sensor.  As the number of pixels continue to increase while the computer screen is stay very much at the HD (1920 x 1080) resolution which is just about 2 MP.  Why do you want to have the cameras with higher resolution?  I can think of two reasons: First, you need to crop the picture to show more details on the full screen.

The centrifuge works using the sedimentation principle, where the centripetal acceleration causes more dense substances to separate out along the radial direction while the lighter objects will tend to move to the top.  The G force attributed to each tube in the centrifuge can change drastically even with a small weigh imbalance when the centrifuge rotor is spinning at high RPMs.  Imbalanced rotors can create excessive vibration which will affect the performance separation and cause damage to your centrifuge and your safety.  Properly balance your centrifuge will ensure optim